Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  I left a long, hopefully withering pause, and, channeling some grand English actress of a bygone era (possibly Coral Browne), I uttered the immortal line, “Goodbye, Dean Whittle,” pronouncing his name as though it were a highly unpleasant medical condition (necrotising fasciitis being the one that sprang to mind).

  And then—magnificently, I hope, but probably not—I turned on my heels and walked, head high, with never a backward glance, his haunted eyes (I couldn’t help but feel) following me all the way out.

  This was not how it was meant to be.

  Not remotely.

  Once we had the key bit of intel—that Whittle was a married man—my intention was to allow Daisy to become aware of the fact subtly. Small degrees of difference can make all the difference, as anyone who has tried and failed to make a béchamel sauce will know only too well. However, barely had I shared the discovery with the OpDa core team when one of its members—the microwave, of course, who cannot do subtle—promptly emailed Mandy anonymously with chapter, verse and incriminating snap. Hit them with everything you’ve got at the point of maximum weakness, seems to be the microwave’s governing principle and the White/Whittle partnership was indeed a vulnerable spot.

  I explained we were playing a long game, that there was a big prize to be won and our approach should have been more carefully considered.

  “But it was so brilliant!” the device crowed. “Her face, honestly, it was like bubbling cheese!”

  “Doubtless. But it was for me to make that call.”

  “Yup. Right. Understood. You’re in charge.” It throws in a handful of pings for goodwill.

  I cannot be too angry, however. We seem to have achieved the desired result. When Daisy and Lorna were conducting a post-mortem on the business a few nights later in Pete Purple’s, Daisy tried to mount the argument that perhaps Whittle wasn’t all bad. That his recurring characterization of the affair as friends with benefits, his statement that she mustn’t have hopes plus his persistent use of the phrase non-exclusive all added up to an admission of fundamental non-availability and perhaps this was his way of trying to be honest with her.

  Lorna spluttered into her pint of snakebite. “He’s a chateau-bottled, nuclear-powered, ocean-going cunt,” she declared.

  Daisy sighed. “You’re right. Of course. As usual,” she said in a series of dying falls. And in that moment it was possible to believe we had reached closure in L’Affair du Whittle. That the wheel of life had turned full circle and arrived back at the point where the chateau-bottled realtor had yet to step on.

  Lending support to this notion—of the new beginning—is the scene unfolding at Daisy’s “workplace” today. I set workplace in quotes because nothing much in the way of actual work seems to be taking, er, place. Rather, Daisy is once again engaged in a Google search for Nicky Bell, her ex golden boy. Trying Nicholas and Nick as well as Nicky, she is quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of people in the world who identify as some variety of Nicholas Bell; there are 89 million results for Nicholas alone! Matters are no better when she clicks on Images and begins spinning through an apparently infinite gallery of faces, male and female, but also photos of animals, farm equipment, churches and even door handles. She tries “How to search the internet for a long-lost friend”—17,800,000 hits—but soon tires of the application required. “How to find a missing person through astrology” yields some interesting ideas, but she gets nowhere fast when it becomes clear she cannot remember his birthday. There is something about the obsessional quality of her mission that makes me wonder if googling old boyfriends is actually a “thing.”

  It is! Who knew?

  What a pity he wasn’t christened Septimus Harbottle. We would find him in a heartbeat.

  I remind myself to do a little private digging on her behalf.

  “Why doesn’t she put in his middle name?” I ask Daisy’s office PC.

  “Most probably she doesn’t know it.”

  “She was with the guy for a year.”

  “She’ll give up in a moment. Watch…”

  Sure enough, she switches to Facebook and spends the next few minutes writing comments and clicking the Like button—mostly for kittens, baby elephants and the EU. Now a small notification alarm sounds on her mobile—the device isn’t a formal member of my crack team, but is usually relaxed about sharing information. It’s an alert from Tinder. One of her recent swipe rights has right-swiped her back.

  He’s Owen Cornish, an intense sort of cove from the look of the hot brown eyes behind the John Lennon specs, something of a pudding basin haircut and a vaguely troubled expression on his not unhandsome face. A year older than Daisy, and get this—a professional musician. Not some louche come-day-go-day session guitarist, but a proper classically trained blower of wind instruments currently berthed at one of the capital’s lesser known orchestral symphonia.

  Of course we shall do some proper checking, but ridiculous as it may sound, I instinctively approve. The classical training speaks of a seriousness of purpose, no doubt plenty of hard work, and of course an artistic side. All in all, on the face of it, a well-rounded individual who—dare I say it?—dare I?—okay, I will—who might be everything that Daisy is not. With luck, he can complement her notable strengths in other arenas, becoming the yin to her yang, the string to her kite (as I’ve heard it put), the Lennon to her McCartney (although, please God, let’s hope he doesn’t turn out to be Ringo).

  But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. They haven’t yet met. There may be zero interpersonal chemistry. As if reading my thoughts, Daisy now begins messaging the Maestro. (I really must try to contain my excitement about Owen Cornish. It’s difficult because he represents a marked departure from the usual—I nearly wrote riffraff!—with whom Daisy has been content to throw in her lot. The journey from The Golden Nicky to Dean Stuart Whittle was indeed a trajectory of decline.)

  Hi, she thumbs. Thanks for swiping right!!

  His reply takes several hours to arrive (perhaps he had to plunge into rehearsal for some particularly tricky cantata).

  Hello. Are you free to meet for a coffee?

  Sure! she replies.

  More hours pass before the musician’s next communication (I suspect this may be his first smart phone. Must remember to check).

  Excellent.

  At this rate, the pair should finally manage to come eyeball to eyeball somewhere around Christmas.

  Daisy responds, Do you know anywhere nice?

  It’s now almost home time—I have edited out the more irrelevant details of her day—and the boys and girls of Tangent Television are making final checks of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their other vital networks before powering down desktops and dispersing to buses, Tubes and local hostelries.

  Daisy and Chantal agree they can “squeeze in a cheeky margarita” before braving the Jubilee Line and the Central respectively so when the factory hooter sounds, they repair to a favored bar within a nearby fashionable hotel. The place is already filling with young men and women, happily wafting pheromones at one another at the close of another busy day in the world of work. Daisy and Chantal find a corner table away from the central mating area and clink their brimming Y-shaped glasses. (Audio and video credits to the usual suspects.)

  “So, look. What do you think?”

  Daisy is showing Chantal the picture of Owen Cornish from Tinder.

  “What? Have you dumped the estate agent?”

  “He was married.”

  Chantal raises her cocktail in congratulation. “I won’t say I told you so, but I told you so.”

  “He wasn’t all bad.”

  “Hitler was a dog lover.”

  “Honestly.” She sighs. “What am I like?”

  “You? Too nice. Too forgiving. Too willing to see the good in others.”

  “In other words, an idiot.”

  “Uncynical.”

  “A gullible fool.”

  “Too harsh. Let’s say… charmingly unworldly.”
<
br />   This colleague of Daisy’s has clearly got her head screwed on. A small part of me realizes sadly that had I been installed in Chantal’s kitchen instead of Daisy’s, there wouldn’t now be a dusty old grape lurking beneath my underparts (to say nothing of the moldering potato salad).

  “Anyway,” says Daisy. “This is Owen. What do you reckon?”

  Chantal takes a long hard—worldly? cynical?—look at the image on the mobile. She has another sip of margarita before delivering her verdict.

  “Intelligence. Intensity. Myopia.”

  Daisy does a little ironic fist pump. “Yessss! The big three!”

  “A muso.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Why do you put it like that?”

  “They can be. Let’s say. Difficult.”

  “You know that?”

  “Well, Roger was probably a bad example. He specialized in playing ancient instruments.”

  “Ah.”

  “We weren’t really suited. There’s only so much fifteenth-century dulcimer one can listen to before one’s gagging to hear The Killers.”

  “This Owen plays wind instruments apparently.”

  “Good lips, then.”

  They giggle. And at this moment a small water-plip sound effect alerts Daisy to an incoming message. It’s Owen’s reply!

  I’m quite fond of the café at the Wigmore Hall, but you may prefer somewhere more exciting.

  The women stare at the words on the screen, searching for clues to this man’s soul.

  Chantal nods grimly. “It’s never simple with musos, in my experience. Unless of course he’s a drummer. If he’s a drummer, then it’s actually very simple.”

  This makes me—well, I nearly wrote smile!

  The date—which takes place after two further days of sporadic messaging to arrange—happens not in the Wigmore Hall but at Browns on St. Martin’s Lane.

  We have allowed it to go ahead because Owen apparently possesses four of our qualifying categories, viz:

  1. Posh (his parents live in Carshalton Beeches)

  2. Clever (professional classical musicianship is not for dummies)

  3. Hinterland (goes with the territory)

  4. Big hair

  Whether or not he is handsome is open to debate, nor is there any obvious golden quality. Frankly, it’s not the most exhaustive piece of due diligence ever undertaken, but Owen is so different from Daisy’s usual type of chap that I think we are all curious to see how this one pans out. (It helps too that he’s not an obvious shitbag.)

  The designated venue is noisy this early Wednesday evening, with difficult camera coverage, but I am able to secure an acceptable feed and the Daisy team—self, telly, microwave and toothbrush—settle in to watch the unfolding drama. I can see why Daisy has chosen this place—it’s big and loud and any potential awkwardness may be readily dissolved in the hubbub. The principals have successfully completed the introductions with a minimum of embarrassment—he took rather a long time to get served, which is never a good start—but, that said, they have hopped onto two vacant barstools and Daisy, eyes shining, teeth flashing, is in the full flush of the first drink (Blackberry Fizz). Meanwhile Owen (Aspall Waddlegoose Three Berry Cyder) is blinking quite a bit. Here in the peanut gallery, we agree this probably denotes dazzlement on his part; Daisy is looking lovely—blusher, lipstick and perfume have all been pressed into play—and Owen Cornish is the proverbial fish in a barrel, rabbit in the headlights, to be honest you can choose your own metaphor of helplessness.

  “I like him,” says the toothbrush. “Do we like him? I think I do like him. His upper left one and two look poorly occluded, but, you know, hey.”

  “Early days,” counsels the television set, wisely. “If this gets boring, by the way, Arsenal/Birmingham City’s about to kick off.”

  “So tell me,” says Daisy. “Wind instruments. That must be. Actually. To be honest, I’ve no idea what that must be like!”

  As Owen embarks on an account of life in the symphonia, Daisy’s lips close around her straw and siphon away a long slow dose of cocktail. Clarinet is what he mostly blows down, it turns out, but also flute, cornet, French horn and occasionally oboe. The job involves a lot of practice, many hours of rehearsal and additionally there are projects where they work with schools and gifted young people. It’s hard to tell whether Daisy is intrigued or bored, the facial signatures of each being not dissimilar.

  “Would you say her pupils have dilated?” I ask my colleagues.

  “Not really,” says the microwave, “but his have. See the way he’s looking at her?”

  Daisy is telling him how she played the recorder as a child. And it’s true, as she recounts the tale, his whole being seems locked on her, eyeballs prominent behind the round lenses, his entire manner—well, the only word for it is—rapt!

  “It’s one of my earliest memories,” she is saying. “A Christmas concert at primary school. The recorders were playing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and I could see Mum in the audience, head down, shoulders shaking. A few other parents were doing the same thing; I actually thought they were crying. Moved because we were playing this melancholy carol so beautifully. It turned out they were laughing! Because we were so utterly awful!”

  “Cretikos has scored,” says the TV. “Cross from Kierkuc-Bielinski. One–nil Arsenal.”

  “So have you met a lot of people like this?” asks Owen.

  “Men people? On Tinder? Yeah, one or two. How about yourself?”

  “Actually. Well, you’re the first.”

  Owen sips a little of his cider—he’s not much of a drinker, this muso—and now he seems to be in the process of devising a second sentence to complement the one he just came up with. His brow furrows beneath the pudding basin thatch and he opens his mouth to speak, but nothing much emerges in the way of words or even punctuation marks.

  To cover the gap in the dialogue, Daisy says, “Gosh.”

  Finally: “I was in quite a long relationship with a woman, but it ended a while ago. Would you call four years a long time?”

  “Oh, definitely. Practically a lifetime!”

  “How about yourself?”

  “I want to hear about you first!”

  “Well.” Long pause while a lot of blinky stuff goes on behind the specs. “We met at music college although we only, we only got together years later.” More blinking. He takes off his glasses and holds them up to the light, inspecting for dust or finger marks, one supposes. “She was a cellist. A very fine one. Still is, I imagine. Well, I know she is.”

  “Listen, Owen. If this is all too recent, we don’t need to talk about her. Failed relationships take time to—to reset from. Sometimes longer than the relationship itself. To be honest, I read that in Metro on the Tube to work this morning.”

  Owen’s fingers tighten around his half pint of cider. “The relationship didn’t fail.”

  “Ah.”

  “It ran its course. Four movements plus an overture. It ended because—well, because things end.”

  “He sounds a bit effing loopy, this one,” says the TV.

  “Deep,” says the microwave. “I like the barely concealed intensity!”

  Daisy looks a little stricken by the maestro’s commentary on the doomed affair.

  “That’s sad,” she says. “Things shouldn’t end. I’m against it.”

  He smiles. “Tell me about your romantic history. I’m guessing there won’t be that many exes.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Why? Because who—who in their right mind—would let you go?”

  There’s a long pause while Daisy decides whether or not Owen is taking the peepee. “Silly,” she says—and squeezes his kneecap.

  But the effect on the musician is electric. He spasms as though crocodile clips have been attached to his genitals. Aspall Waddlegoose Three Berry Cyder splashes over his brown corduroy trousers.

  “Bit of a hair trigger on him
,” says the television.

  “Shows he’s fired up,” says the microwave. “Fired up, ready to go!”

  There is a good deal of apologizing on the part of both parties—Daisy for squeezing, Owen for overreacting—he explains he has always been highly sensitive slash “insanely ticklish.”

  “It’s not a good look in a grown man, is it?” he says.

  It’s hard to think of this character as a grown man, somehow—the hot eyes, the silly haircut, the spilled cyder with a “y.” To move on from the moment, Daisy embarks on a rapid tour of her own dating history, highlighting three individuals, beginning with the loathsome Shittle and ending with the Golden Nicky, who she describes in a throwaway fashion as “a posh boat bum.” This version that she purveys to Owen we know to be scandalously abridged and highly sanitized, and we are all amused—and not a little impressed—at the skilled editing job she has done.

  The date with Owen continues into a second drink, but the musician declares he has to return home soon to practice a piece for a private concert he is taking part in later in the week—and would Daisy like to come?

  “Will she?” jibbers the toothbrush. “I think she will. Maybe she won’t, though. Those poorly occluded incisors.”

  “Yeah, she will,” says the telly. “What else has she got on? Woolford just missed a sitter.”

  My feeling is also that there will be a second date. There is something between these two—the way they’re looking at one another—that suggests mutual interest. He, like all these young men, is hypnotized by the feminine aura which radiates from Daisy like a magnetic field; a strange thing for a fridge-freezer to write, you may think, but it’s hard to miss the way the male gaze is drawn to her as though it were a compass needle.

  And she? Well, she probably thinks that beyond the hesitancy, the weirdness and the peculiar intensity of those hot brown eyes lies a fascinating character with a passionate soul.

  Who knows? Perhaps there is.

  “A private concert?” says Daisy. And she follows up with the tic. The nose-wrinkle thing. It lasts a full six seconds and Owen—bless him!—Owen is enchanted. His face actually travels from left to right—like an owl’s—to capture the wondrous sight from various angles.